Although the manufacture of meat emulsions in the preparation of sausage-type products is an ancient art, and has been carried out on a commercial scale for many years, there has been very little consideration of the drying of such meat emulsions. For sausage-type products, the emulsions are prepared by adding salt and water, usually in the form of ice, and the mixture is subjected to shear-type mixing to form the emulsion, which is then used in the sausage products without moisture removal. Such products necessarily require refrigeration for storage, distribution, and sale.
Recently, the inventors of the present application have been studying the drying of meat emulsions for the preparation of products which can be stored without refrigeration. The first results of these studies are disclosed in the thesis of Theodore S. Lioutas, entitled "Effect of Atmospheric Drum Drying on Beef Emulsions on the Quality of the Dehydrated Meat Product", submitted in 1982, University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill. Mr Lioutas and his Major Professor, Dr. Marvin P. Steinberg, found that the manufacturing of dried beef emulsions was greatly improved by the addition of relatively large amounts of water to the meat mixture. The optimum conditions determined by these earlier studies were with 100% added water and 1% added salt (NaCl) based on the raw red meat.
With respect to meat emulsions, it is known that the amount of salt soluble protein in the formed emulsion relates to the amount of added salt. In producing a fat-in-water emulsion with the water being the continuous phase and fat the discontinuous phase, the water and salt soluble protein emulsify the fat globules by encasing them in a protein film. See Hansen, Food Tech., 14:565 (1960); and Swift et al, Food Tech., 15:468 (1961). However, in the preparation of dried meat emulsions, the addition of excess water has the disadvantage of requiring more heat energy in the drying of the emulsion. Further, the addition of excess salt may be undesirable from a health standpoint, the trend in food products being toward minimal salt content.